Why do we at DoorGrow do what we do? In this episode you’ll hear an interview with Sterling Davis, a property manager who saw his 60 door business grow to 300 doors in just six months after investing in our Seed Package.

You’ll Learn…

[3:00] How Sterling Davis first got into contact with DoorGrow and why[5:40] “If you’re serious, you’ll pay it”: Why investing in his business motivated Sterling[9:30] Creating a brand to sell with the right tools[12:45] The results Sterling achieved in his first 6 months[13:25] Portfolio and monthly revenue breakdown[16:30] Life after the Seed Package: Marriage, business, and finances[18:15] What would business be like without the Seed package?[19:15] Sterling’s thoughts on the value of following the Seed Package and getting used to being uncomfortable[23:50] Breaking down what’s included in the Seed Package and what benefits you can expect from following it

Resources

Transcript

Jason: Welcome DoorGrowHackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and expand your rent roll, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrowHacker.

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to grow property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, expand the market and help the best property managers win. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, open up iTunes, find the DoorGrowShow, subscribe, and then give us a real review. Thank you for helping us with that vision.

This is episode number 22 of the DoorGrowShow. None of my episodes have really been about self-promotion so far. In fact, a lot of you are probably wondering, “Why is this guy doing all of this?” I don’t think you guys understand that it takes me probably about four hours an episode. I actually had to start having a company help me put this together and produce this.

Sterling Davis is my guest in this episode of Ethosity Property Management. You’re gonna hear the story of how Sterling and I started together. He was making $2,000 a month and had like 50 or 60 doors when he started. He’d been stuck there. He’d been in business for about three years.

After six months of working with us here at DoorGrow, he just did what I told him to do. He just followed the steps that we told him to do through our Seed Package Process and he is in 6 months at 300 doors.

His whole life has changed and it’s just a fantastic story that shows if people have the right process, the right systems, the right mindset, and are giving the right direction, and they go and take action, the results that they can achieve.

Have a listen to this, I think you’d be really blown away. It’s a very inspiring story. I’m honored to have been able to work with Sterling. We love, love, love, love, love being able to get results with our clients like this. If you’re interested in this, you know who to talk to. No more preface, no more attention here to outset, let’s get into the show.

Sterling, tell people the kind of your story when you first approached me or heard about DoorGrow.

Sterling: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Jason: Thanks for being here.

Sterling: I approached Jason, I think it was January of this year. I saw his videos, I saw his YouTube, and I was really intrigued about what he’s trying to do. That made me reach out and I was like, “Hey, I wanna grow my business. I know it’s something I need to do.” At that time we’re at 60 doors. I was like man, I know I need to do it but I was scared. I had all these feelings and emotions. He told me the price and I was like, “Man, I just don’t know if that’s worth it.”

Jason: What did I tell you? What price was it then?

Sterling: I can’t even remember to be honest.

Jason: It was at least $3k.

Sterling: No, it was well above $3k. It was emotional for me to figure out like is this something that I really wanna do just because it was a huge price commitment for only having 60 doors when I have to pay $3,000 and you guys are getting it for less than that. It was amazing.

He told me basically, he was like, “Hey, I want you to come back when you’re serious and you know this is what you wanna do.” I took about two months. I’m just like, “Hey, let me try to do all these other things that I think I can do.” But we still hung around adding a door a month. I was like, “I’m just not satisfied with the growth that we’re doing.”

Jason: Most property managers are adding usually between one, two, four doors a month depending on the [inaudible [00:04:59].

Sterling: Right.

Jason: This is normal. Most people think that’s as good as it gets.

Sterling: Yeah. I did. But I’m an entrepreneur. I’m really big about growth. I’m not in here to be a property manager, I’m here to get these doors up and to make money. If I’m gonna sit up here and have one door a month, then I’m gonna go find some other business to be in, to be honest. With doing so, immediately I’m like, “I’m ready. I’m ready to hit the ground running. “Whatever you tell me…” I told Jason, I was like, “You’re the coach, I’m the player, let’s do this.” I went through the basic instructions.

Jason: Let’s take a step back. The first time you reached out to me, you asked me for a discount. Remember this?

Sterling: Yeah, yeah. I did.

Jason: What did I tell you?

Sterling: You said, “No, if you’re serious you’ll pay it.”

Jason: He asked for a discount he’s like, “I’ll get started right now. Could you just give me like for this, give me this discount on your whatever.” I told you, “No. When you’re ready, get the money and come back.” What did you say about that? It took you a little bit to get the funds together.

Sterling: Yeah, it did, it did. What it did was it made yourself so high value. If you don’t know what high value is, you will once you sign up. Making yourself high value–I have people that reached out to me since you put my name out there that had seen my growth. They’re like, “What did you do? People are cutting my prices.” I was like, “They taught me how to be high valued.” Even our first interaction of you telling me that, your attitude and your confidence, I started having that attitude and confidence and I was willing to transform.

Jason: You transformed.

Sterling: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Jason: I wanna point this out. Here’s this little tip and a little secret. If you don’t value yourself and your business enough to invest in it, how can you expect anyone to value your business and invest in it if you’re not willing to? Sterling invested in himself. He valued himself. That alone can be a mindset game changer for people trying to grow your own business.

Sterling: I put the money up. At this point, I can’t lose. I have to go through this, I have to watch the videos, I have to go through your coaching and do it over and over again, I took notes, and it really took action. People ask me, I have so many people that reached out since they saw on LinkedIn and all of this stuff, it was like, “Hey, what was it?” I’m like, “Well, at the end of the day, I did what he told me to do.” At this point I know what I’m doing is not working.

Utilizing Jason and his team, they were excellent, I mean, honestly, their engagement and their follow up was two of the things that really impressed me and it kept me engaged. I was like, “Alright, Sterling, why didn’t you do this? You’re supposed to take this by this date, you didn’t get this done.” I was like, “You know what, I’ll slack, let me get back in this.”

At that time, I always wanted my wife to be on board but we just didn’t have enough doors to support her. We needed to find a good foundation and that’s what DoorGrow did for us is really stabilize our foundation to say this is who we are and this is what we stand for. For us, I spent tons of money on a brand strategy already. I was stubborn in ways to be flexible with transforming my brand. But honestly, the things that I learned from Jason, I wish I didn’t spend the $30,000 for my brand initially because of the things that we went through the first month. I would at least been able to have that $30,000 to my pocket that’s working capital. Now you know the sky’s the limit at that point.

Jason: You could have probably bought a franchise for that.

Sterling: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Jason: You want to know what’s funny? I get franchisees calling me all the time. They paid out $30k or more sometimes, they have the same problem. The problem is still there.

Sterling: That’s what I knew. I had a decision between growing to franchise or going to private. I was like, “I can grow it myself. I can do that if I have a good brand, if I have something good that I can sell.” The problem was my brand was okay but I didn’t have the tools necessary to support the brand. I didn’t know what my value of my doors were. I didn’t know how to find my prospective clients.

Those things were the basis to moving forward. At the end of the day, everybody wants to make money, everybody wants to add doors. I think the DoorGrow approach changed that where we added more doors but we added higher value doors. Initially my 60, to give you perspective, I was making on the 60 doors somewhere around $1,500-$2,000 on it.

Jason: A year, you mean, per door?

Sterling: Per month. I was making $1,500.

Jason: Oh, in total with those, okay.

Sterling: Yeah. To $2,000 total with those. How am I living off this? I just added off of what we talked about in the DoorGrow Seed Package in the value of your clients and things and really knowing–if you go on my website, you can know my prices.

Jason: After we launched your site, in that first month you said you added 20 new doors.

Sterling: Yup, yup. All those 20 new doors, I made $2,000 a month off each door. I was at 60.

Jason: Wait, wait, wait. $2,000 a month in total with those 20 you mean?

Sterling: Right, right.

Jason: Okay.

Sterling: My whole revenue, I was just doing 10% flat, didn’t have a minimum.

Jason: You grew about 30%?

Sterling: Right.

Jason: To the third but you doubled your revenue?

Sterling: Right. Less doors, more revenue.

Jason: A way to do it. If you could have a bunch of doors and get the same amount of money as fewer doors, doesn’t it make sense? Your costs are lower.

Sterling: Absolutely, absolutely.

Jason: More profit.

Sterling: Yeah, more profit. That’s the thing where property management, that’s how we make money, it has to be that way or it’s gonna be a struggle, you’re going to have bad doors.

The first month we added 20 new doors. I was like man, I’m content, this has surpassed my goal, I was like oh, maybe if I hit like 4-6, I think that would be a goal for my one door a month. With hitting the 20 doors, I was like, “What?” I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t prepared.

Jason: A great problem to have.

Sterling: Absolutely it is. Utilized the resources, we added Property Meld I think at that time which is a maintenance provider. We started looking at different VAs that can help us understand…

Jason: Don’t give all your secrets away just yet.

Sterling: Okay, sorry, sorry.

Jason: We wanna hear results, share the results. I’m gonna do a whole another event with you. We’ll do an interview with some of them maybe on the DoorGrow Show, but we’re gonna do a private event and talk about your prospecting method, your unique spin on the stuff that I’ve shared. We’re gonna do that, and I wanna offer that to the Seed Package clients. You willing to do that with me?

Sterling: Absolutely, absolutely. I grew from that to where we are today. We’re now well over, I think the last time we looked at Propertyware we had 305 doors, which this is 6 months. I think I’ll look at my thing…

Jason: Tell us about the makeup of this portfolio now, I mean this is crazy, 300 doors.

Jason: Multifamily can be pretty wild. It was just like one property with 200 units or…?

Sterling: No. They’re 50 or less. We have some that are 11, some that are 46, but mostly what we have one complex that’s 24, 50 and less is kind of that threshold. When you go above there, you’d realize that it’s just not profitable for how we were setup.

Jason: Yes, you gotta have a limit. What are you pulling in on monthly basis? If you’re willing to share.

Sterling: Right now with just the doors or with all the other stuff?

Jason: Let’s do with property management and then you can with other stuff.

Sterling: Yeah. The property management last time when this goes through a full cycle, we’ll be pulling in roughly $26,000 with our property management.

Jason: That’s crazy, that’s crazy.

Sterling: It is, it is.

Jason: That’s 10 times what you were pulling in before when you first came to us.

Sterling: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Jason: I looked at my CRM, it was like July that you signed up. That’s been like basically six months. It took us a month just to get your site launched initially. Really it’s been about six months or so.

Sterling: Absolutely. Now, we’re at the point where I’m the badass guy that can say to the clients like–I had a talk with someone last week, I was like, “Hey no, straighten up, pay my fees or I’m cutting you off.” Now that $26,000, we wanna get that higher because it’s like, dude, we don’t need low hanging fruit. You cost us more money but initially we had to take on people that were only making…

Jason: Beggars can’t be choosers!

Sterling: Absolutely.

Jason: Sterling is no longer a beggar.

Sterling: Oh, no, no, no. I’m legally confident, like I can say, “Hey, we don’t need you because you don’t make up 80% of my business anymore.”

Jason: You said outside of property management, what else is going on? Real estate, is that what you’re talking about?

Sterling: Oh, it’s just all the other fees that we charge.

Jason: In total what’s the business pulling in probably next month?

Sterling: In general, per month–we’ll be doing real estate–but next month, we do real estate. We just helped somebody buy a $2.6 million thing, next month we close, next month we’ll be doing $65,000. It’s one of those things that’s hard to…

Jason: Sterling, how has your life changed? How were you feeling when you first came to us? How was your life 12 months before that? What’s life like right now for you and the holidays? People are usually freaking out going into Christmas.

Sterling: Absolutely. It’s my first Christmas that me and my wife are not having a discussion where it’s like how much revenue do you have coming in? How are you gonna pay for Christmas? It’s exciting for me because I’ve been an entrepreneur for so many years now and Christmas is when it really slows down or we feel the effects. It’s what? No, actually we’re working next week. This is a great opportunity for us to be here and work. We’re adding so many doors, we have literally 14 houses that we need to get released right now. We have to work, I’d rather be doing this than trying to figure out where the next dollar is coming from.

Jason: Yeah. How’s that impacted your marriage then?

Sterling: It’s phenomenal. I told you initially my goal is to have my wife on board which I think the initial goal was for my wife to realize financial freedom and flexibility in her work. Now I think the next move is like alright, how can we get my wife out of the business so she can be more flexible, be inside of our family, do things with our kids. I think the original goal of just having her in the business so we can have entrepreneurship and the flexibility that comes with it has now changed to when is the exit strategy to get her off the frontline and get her so that she can only be working two times a week or three times a week. She can still just hang out with the kids really.

Jason: If you hadn’t done the Seed Package, what do you think Christmas would be like right now?

Sterling: I’m one of those people, I just got the goal of everything because I’m a salesperson. With being skeptical, I was really skeptical of finding someone online that was gonna telling me I can grow, but my Christmas last year set us back. I was pulling money from areas of our business, in our home that we just didn’t have.

At this point, from a lot of the things that we can talk about and how they help me structure my business, I’m paying myself, I may even pay my wife, I’m even paying for Christmas not go in debt. In the business, our expenses and stuff are in control, we’re in control of all those things right now.

Jason: Anything else you think people should know about the Seed Package before I dig into it?

Sterling: I think the main thing is that if you ask me was it a good investment, I made way more money than whatever dollar amount the Seed Package is now. I’m always grateful because now, it’s a carry over. It’s something that as we grow, everybody is going through it, everybody’s gonna be able, and we can grow exponentially by just going through and learning our business.

I think the one thing that I keep hearing is like people ask me, “Is this a cold calling thing? Is this a cold calling thing?” No, it’s an action thing. If you’re afraid to take action, then you’re probably gonna fail at this.

I think people associate cold calling with hard work and they don’t understand that it’s gonna take a certain amount of uncomfortability, if that’s a word, to make sure that you are successful. If you’re willing to be uncomfortable, and you’re willing to really understand the channels, and what it takes, then you’re gonna succeed.

Jason: What do you think is more uncomfortable, struggling to figure out how to grow your business and throwing a bunch of money at marketing firms hoping they’ll just hand you business, or doing the Seed Package, following the videos on sales and prospecting, and taking action, and interrupting people if necessarily, and the pain of sales?

Sterling: Absolutely. Somebody asked me do I cold call? I was like I don’t have to cold call.

Jason: We do have that method in there now, we have cold calling in there but that’s probably the least effective method in there.

Sterling: Absolutely. That’s what I told him, I was like, I know people that do cold calling may do it well. They have grown way past I’ve grown. But for me at this point, I think it’s a couple of videos and I’ll let those people take their shot at it because I think they own it. But it was a couple of videos that really stuck with my style that I was like, “Oh, man, I’m gonna rock this out.” And I did.

Jason: We’re gonna do an event, we’re gonna showcase your method and I’ve got another method we’re gonna showcase with one of my other Seed Package clients that grew using another strategy.

We’re adding some more value to this. The Seed Package has been $3k and I’ve had no problem selling it. We’ve sold probably over 50 of these and it’s just been awesome. The difference between Sterling and other people that come on there was Sterling believed me and took action whereas I get a lot of people that come on and they think they know everything because we’re entrepreneurs, we do, we think we know everything. We think we could do things better or we just don’t do it.

Most of them, when I follow up or they talk to me and they’re like, “Hey Jason, how do I get what Sterling has, or how do I get what John has, or how do I do this?” I ask them, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I should probably watch the videos.” I can give everybody the magic box of stuff but they can set it on the shelf and let it gather dust before they can take action.

Sterling: Oh, no.

Jason: That’s the thing.

Sterling: I watched those videos. I watched it once just for understanding of the video and then I watched it over and over again until I’m able to regurgitate it in a way that I felt comfortable with it.

Jason: The videos are not short either, are they?

Sterling: Oh, no, no.

Jason: They’re long, but are they full of fluff?

Sterling: Oh, no, no. I can talk about it for days. Certain videos I think helped us more than others and those videos I’m trying to figure out a way to steal it and sell it bootleg, sell copies of it to people because those videos are money. There’s certain things that if you’re gonna grow your business–for us, the $3,000 that we paid, we made that price over 10 times over and now we’re like…

Jason: You got a return on that in your first month, my package is paying you now.

Sterling: Absolutely, absolutely. Especially because all I do is steal your language, and I seem like a genius.

Jason: Yeah. This package isn’t something that I just put together this summer. There’s stuff in it that I’ve spent my entire life figuring out and learning and threw it in there.

Cool. I’m gonna get into it, are you guys excited to hear about this? You guys wanna hear about this or you just feel engaged? If you’re interested you wanna hear what’s going on with this package instead of just hear a big testimonial, put a big yes in here and I’ll tell you about what’s in it, and what we would do for you guys.

Jason: Yeah. Okay. Cool. Sterling, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate you taking out, I hope you have an awesome Christmas. I know it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow. I’m glad you’re gonna have this great Christmas.

Sterling: I haven’t been able to send them a message or anything, but I really do appreciate everything that you guys have done for us and I can talk about this for days on end.

Jason: This is so rewarding for me because the mission statement I gave my team and we put on the tent for DoorGrow is to transform property management businesses and their owners. That’s our wise statement, that’s our purpose, that’s really what we wanna do. Our goal isn’t just to get money from people. I like making money, but how rewarding is it to make a difference, and I get to do both.

Sterling: Absolutely.

Jason: I’m getting a little bit emotional just saying this, but Sterling I’m so grateful to have people like you that take action and get the results because they do the effing work.

Sterling: No. Get started with paying the money. Pay the money. You really are taking your time to make sure that we get results from this, and it’s proven. It’s literally proven and some of the people…

Jason: You’re the proof.

Sterling: Yeah. I guess so, man. It’s changed my strategy. I thought it was one of those things that we were just gonna do short time. We’re gonna be able to add a hundred doors and we just go sit on a beach, I’m like why sit down? Get up, let’s get to a thousand doors, let’s knock that out.

Jason: Yeah, there’s nothing more exciting or fun about being successful. I’ve been experiencing that this year too. Alright, to our mutual growth, Sterling, appreciate you, I’ll let you out here.

Sterling: Thanks man. Have a good day.

Jason: Wow, isn’t that just awesome. I can’t tell you how rewarding that is. It never gets old to hear my clients succeeding and winning, that’s really what drives us here at DoorGrow.

If you want to be like Sterling, if you’ve been struggling with growth and you wanna see what he did, check out our DoorGrow Seed Package, you can check that out at doorgrow.com/seed-package.